


Pig & Goose; or, there are no rules to magic

by tigrrmilk



Category: Die Gänsemagd | The Goose Girl, Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/F, lots of fairytale nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2019-01-06 13:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12212511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: “You said there are no rules to magic,” Goose said.“There aren’t,” Pig said back. “But I have rules. And I won’t stay if you break them.”





	Pig & Goose; or, there are no rules to magic

**Author's Note:**

> this is quite loosely based on the goose girl. you don't really need to know it at all to read this. but if you want to, you can read it online [here](https://germanstories.vcu.edu/grimm/gans_e.html).

 

 

i had a dream, or was it real?  
we crossed the line and it was on  
 _(we crossed the line, it was on this time)_  
-  
**carly rae jepsen - _cut to the feeling_**

 

 

 

 

 

“I’ll only have a boy who’s got no magic,” she says, when asked. Usually at family parties. A ribbon threaded through her hair. Horizontal, red. It’s the start of a riddle.

“Not that one again,” her aunt says.

“Goose,” she says in reply. “Goose, you should know better than anyone.” Goose is in ratty mohair the colour of rust, white hair shedding on each shoulder. She’d been brought up as a princess, but she decided to save the world instead. She’s not a goose, but she flies like one.

Goose smiles, and says, “I knew a boy with magic once.”

What she doesn’t say is: and another one too.  _ That’s how we ended up here. _

It was Goose who first taught her about magic. She’d fallen from the short cliff at the end of the garden and had broken her ankle, and she wouldn’t stop crying. “Sea, Sea,” Goose had said. Sea’s mother was somewhere else. “Sea, that’s why we have rules. Rule number one: don’t run near the cliff. Rule number two: don’t trip.”

Sea had said, “I don’t like the rules.” She was very small. She liked running at the end of the garden because if she ran fast enough and jumped she could reach the apples on the tree. They were hard and small and bitter, but sometimes she felt sick and she wanted to eat one. They made her sicker. She’d be sick so quickly. She could throw up in the water and feel better by tea.

Besides, you know what happens when you give children rules. “Don’t eat the apples,” her mother had said. So of course she ate the apples.

“Let me tell you a secret,” Goose said. Her hair was dead coral, and when she pulled Sea close she smelt of cigarette ash and soap. Sea still couldn’t put any weight on her ankle. There was no blood, so at first she’d thought she could just go home and pretend nothing had happened. But then she put her foot down, and she hadn’t been able to stop crying. Goose took hold of her ankle and started to rub.

“It still hurts!” Sea said. They were on the beach, but it was low tide. Sea had asked her mother, once, when she was even littler: “Why am I named after the sea?” She woke up every day to its hue and cry. Bright sea-sponges washed up, drying in the sun.   
  
Sea’s mother said it was because she gave birth to her on the beach. In a fanciful letter Sea’s mother painstakingly wrote in her scratchy bad hand, years later, she said that it was because she gave birth in her attic, facing the window, and the sea was the first thing she saw as Sea rushed out, covered in blue shit and blood. Goose says it’s just short for something else. “It’s the first letter of your real name. You’re too young for it yet.”

But now Sea is a  _ grown-up _ and she thinks Goose’s full of shit. 

She’s not even her  _ aunt _ . Sometimes Sea comes into the house at an unexpected time and she finds Goose in her mother’s room, looking through her clothes as if she’s going to find her there. But she can’t. There’s not even a single little moth dreaming. 

There’s not even a single mouth dreaming.

Hush, hush. That was the sea, not Goose. The ocean, not Sea. Starting to come in. “I want you to sing. I don’t care what.” Her stern voice, hair falling into her face as she said it. But then Goose started to sing herself. It was just a song that was always on the radio, but without the words. Sea couldn’t sing along so she whistled sadly between sobs. And Goose rubbed her ankle. And when the song was done Goose said, “There.”

Sea put her foot down again. Then she lifted the other one up. It held. It didn’t hurt. Goose said, “Good.” The sea was rushing in now. But it was still far away. There was time. “The secret,” Goose said, “is that there are no rules for magic. Remember that.”

That night, Sea sang the song to herself, although she still didn’t know the new words. This time she didn’t need to fix her ankle. This time she stared at her ceiling and wished it was clear through; she wanted to see the night sky. The song ended and it came to be. She woke up that night in what she thought was a sweat, but it was actually a shower of rain. Her mother said,  _ magic might not have rules but I do. You need a ceiling. And if you do magic easy it’ll give you the easiest fix.  _ But once she fixed the attic roof back on she let Sea paint its insides blue.

“I could do this with magic too,” Sea said. There was paint on her mouth. Her mother laughed. 

“Yes, dear heart,” she said. “But it won’t feel like much.”

Sea was still very little. She could only reach the low parts of the sloping sides. Goose was drinking something that looked like paint water, sitting on Sea’s little bed, not-helping. Her mother was painting the middle, stretched up to her full height. She was so tall.

Sometimes Goose would start to sing. That’s what it’s always been like, with her. She’d sing while burning breakfast, while reading the paper, or while rubbing cream into Sea’s mother’s burnt back. Or sometimes, while doing nothing at all.

“Why does she sing?” Sea asked, once. 

Sea’s mother took her hand. Sea’s fingers were long and had started to curl at the ends. “You need to cut your nails,” she said.

When she was fifteen, she said to Goose, “Why do you sing? Mum says that’s easy magic.”

Goose said, “I think magic  _ should  _ be easy. Besides. I only use it for the big things.”

 

***

 

Goose writes letters to Sea’s mother. “If you sang hard enough, you could bring her back,” Sea says. But Goose says, no. She has to  _ want  _ to come back. 

Sea thinks that maybe Goose  _ can’t  _ sing. Not for that. She wouldn’t know the words. That’s what the letters are for. Using up the wrong ones.

She was halfway through breakfast once, and Goose hadn’t stopped singing for hours. Her voice was giving out. She’d been up half the night. It was only later that Sea asked, and Goose could say:  _ The world was dying. I had to stop it. _ Sea had been too caught up in her boiled bread roll and the sweet chipolatas stuffed inside it to notice, but the world had been flickering. The edges turning in.

 

***

 

It starts the last night before Sea leaves for university. She’s never spent more than a handful of nights away before. She doesn’t sleep well away from the sea. Especially now that the sea has started to swallow the garden. The cliff has gone, except for at low tide, when its ghost emerges with wet feet. She worries that the whole world -- her house and tree -- will be consumed while she isn’t looking.

Sea and Goose lay on the attic floor, blankets and cushions spread beneath them. Sea mutters under her breath as she moves them around, and they multiply until there are only a few pockmarks of wooden floor left exposed. “Well, since your mother’s not here...” Goose says, and she sings until the ceiling falls and the roof is open, gone. She sings until all the other lights go out and they are left with the half-overcast sky and the few stars that could break through.

Sea raises a hand and Goose says, “Don’t. We need the rain.”

Goose says, “I never told you about how it happened.”

“The boy?” Sea asks. Whenever she has asked for this story before, that’s all she’d get.  _ There was a boy _ .

“The boy,” Goose says. “He had no magic. He wore a sheepskin cloak and he had a fat head.”

“He was a prince,” Sea says, disgusted.

Goose had been young when her castle had burnt to the ground. She ran, barefoot, with a girl she’d never met before -- a servant, in charge of the pigs and geese. Goose had collected her favourite things in her skirt, which she was holding up from the ground. She tripped and she tripped and she managed not to fall. Her skin had split and it hurt more to keep going.

“You’re too slow,” the servant girl said. She showed Goose how to hide her things -- in her mouth, in her hair, in her underwear. Magic, or not with magic. “You just need to find somewhere that boys won’t look.” True innocence. The belongings weren’t so precious, anyway -- or they wouldn’t be, to boys. Which is all the protection they really had. And yet even that wouldn’t stop them from being taken. A mirror set into a shell from the beach on the other side of the castle. A broken necklace. The servant girl fixed this with magic and put it around Goose’s neck, and Goose made her a matching pendant from air. She hadn’t known she could. But she had started to sing, and then it was there. A bundle of letters tied with string. Sunblock. Two little books. Her favourite pen. Water. A long-dead cat’s collar.

Goose asked the servant girl her name, but she took three days to answer. On the third evening, as the sun was setting and she was calling the trees to form shelter, she took pity on Goose, who was cowed and lonely. Goose had never been so far from the castle, and had never felt so useless in her life. “My name is Pig,” she said.

“Oh,” Sea says, when Goose reaches this part of the story.

“Yes,” Goose says. She shifts where she lies. “Your mother.”

Pig had taught Goose that they could do whatever they want by magic; they need not walk, they need not even look to find anywhere else to live. “We could make our own town from the trees?” Goose said.

Pig said, “We could, but we won’t. You’re desperate for someone to look after you.”

“We can make people,” Goose said, but Pig didn’t like that.

“You can’t make people  _ for  _ you,” she said. “You can only make people, and hope they don’t hate you for it.”

“You said there are no rules to magic,” Goose said.

“There aren’t,” Pig said back. “But  _ I _ have rules. And I won’t stay if you break them.”

Goose went to say, “I don’t care if you stay or not, you’re a servant.” But the words died in her throat. She coughed, hard, and saw fireworks. Later, Pig taught her how to sing.

Before they came to the next castle, Pig told Goose to swap places with her. Goose plaited her hair and they swapped shoes. “Keep your things hidden,” Pig said. “I’ll be the princess.  _ Promise me _ .”

Goose pauses here. “It was a game,” she says. “I thought it was a game. She smiled at me.”

“A game?” Sea asks.

“When you play tennis, you observe a totally arbitrary set of lines painted onto the ground,” Goose says. “They can ruin your life, those lines. But you still know they’re only lines.”

“A game,” Sea says, and she doesn’t add that tennis is a sport, and nobody should get hurt if they’re just  _ playing _ .

Pig slept in a princess’s bedchamber, and Goose slept in the barn with the geese and pigs. Pig had never slept in such a comfortable bed. The boy who changed everything was the prince of this castle. Pig was pretty, and regal, and she knew how magic worked. “You just have to believe in it,” she said to Goose, that last night outside. “The problem is that it works for everyone else too.”

Goose sang to herself to make dresses. Goose sang to herself to make the geese into girls, who became shy but easy friends, and turned back to birds by morning. Goose sang to herself to make the pigs into boys, but she had never spoken to boys before, and she didn’t know how to begin. Goose saw the sky crackle one hot afternoon as if the world was about to snap open, and then she began to sing. Goose stitched feathers together and made herself a blanket. Goose made it rain, and Pig stayed inside the castle until it let up, which is how Goose knew that Pig didn’t want to leave, that she enjoyed the excuse. Pig could have made an umbrella out of nothing; Pig could have sent the rain back into the sky.

There was another boy who cleaned the horses, and he liked to look in on Goose’s barn. When he found her mid-song, he’d watch, twisting straw between his fingers. One day he found her singing to save the world, but all he heard were some half-mumbled words and a tune he didn’t know. When she ran out of breath and the world didn’t cave in, he said, “Let me help.”

Goose trusted him, and Pig wasn’t there to tell her not to.

 

***

 

“You might as well not bother,” Pig said to Goose once, many years on. It was midday and the sky was almost gone. “The world ends all the time.” She didn’t mean it; she just said it.

Goose had got into the habit long, long ago. In the filthy barn. Like biting her nails. She doesn’t realise it’s happening until there’s blood everywhere.

 

***

 

Goose saw Pig rarely then -- across the courtyard. She wore fussy dresses and had her own servant girls now, with names like Emmeline and Grace.

“And you still loved her?” Sea interrupts to ask.

Goose smiles. “Yes. Remember -- we both knew I could change it back like that.” She snaps her fingers poorly. The sound is mostly just her bones. “We were just stretching out the set. We knew we’d end back together.”

_ Then why aren’t you together now, _ Sea doesn’t ask next. 

Pig had not grown up in the castle, but in a village  _ Without _ . That was its name - Without. Without walls, or petty kings, or princesses. “Your mother learned how to speak like a princess from me, but it’s easily forgotten,” Goose says. But... One day... what? The prince noticed  _ what _ ? A shibboleth is a dirty form of magic used by such boys, and hard to pinpoint by those who have no use for it. Perhaps Pig said  _ fuck  _ when she hurt herself, used the wrong names for meat at the supper table, used her knife with too much force, and the prince thought --  _ no _ . No, you are no princess.

Maybe he watched her through the slats of the bathroom door and he saw that she washed her own hair.

The stable-boy asked Goose to marry him that night, one night, the same as all of the others and yet so awful, and she laughed, and then sang him away when he wouldn’t take it for the most gracious  _ No  _ she could offer. The prince heard her sing and the hair on the nape of his neck stood... or, no. The prince’s hackles rose.

The stable boy went to the prince. There. Goose had not expected that anyone else could cross the lines; that there were other ways, other motives. That a servant’s superstition and wild tales could be used, and wished on.

The stable-boy killed her geese. The prince killed their horse, a barbarity that Goose still finds it hard to think of, that she has to whisper around. 

Goose couldn’t sing them back, her poor dead loves; it wouldn’t be the same.

 

\---

 

There were so many boys at Sea’s university. So many types of boys! And she found herself shrinking away from all of them. Goose wrote her a letter and said she hadn’t meant the story as a cautionary tale, but even then, eighteen years old in her socks, Sea knew that Goose always lied.

Sea made friends with two girls on her staircase. One of them had a boyfriend, but the other didn’t. She wore scratchy blue woollen dresses that lost their shape sometime between breakfast and lunch. She was called Dinah.

The other girl was  _ Teal _ . Her boyfriend was called Frankie, although Sea never met him. They wrote letters. That’s what Teal said if anyone asked her about him:  _ we write letters _ . He was at actuarial school; “it’s basically magic,” Teal said, frustrated, the one time she tried to explain what actuaries actually  _ do _ . “That’s what he said when I asked. He thought I wouldn’t get it. It’s  _ magic _ , he said.”

By  _ magic  _ he meant: I won’t expose the inner workings to you. It was -- a feint, a defence. Sea felt it in her throat.

_ It’s not what magic should be. _

Sea had wished, when she was fourteen, to be taller than everyone -- than Goose and Pig, anyway. Who else was there? She had sung to that wish, and she had never fixed the results. They were not short, and so she was so tall. She towered over them. But in the women’s college rooms, with low beams and ceilings, she found herself thinking -- maybe it’s time to be smaller than this again. She was tall enough that people noticed. That she caught her head on wood and fittings, sometimes. That Teal had to look up to her. That Dinah didn’t bother. No, it was the other way around. Sometimes, sometimes. Friendships change in little ways as the rain blows one way or the other. Either way or none, they were friends.

 

\---   
  


“What happened to Pig after that?” Sea asks. The prince wasn’t her father. And if Pig had gone on to marry anyone, it would surely have been Goose. There had been no reconciliation.

“A little of this, a little of that,” Goose says. 

The prince could change into anything, anything at all. Anything he wanted. He became the stove Goose toasted bread on, the rancid butter she sang to. He followed her because she would not speak willingly. 

“Did you make a promise?” He said. “Tell me who you really are.”

Maybe, after all, it came down to this; he could not have Pig, and so she was not worthy. The world’s difficulties must be nothing more than puzzles for him to solve.   


Once he believed he had proof of the trick, the swap they’d made; well, then. He’d won. Hadn't he? Wasn’t it time for the game to be over?

He knew he had that power. It's what all rich boys know. And now he saw a crack of what he thought was light.

But it was lightning. Nobody's friend.

Except Pig had always liked storms.

“You’re no princess,” he said to Pig, who always had liked to say things to him like:

_ Princes aren’t real; princesses aren’t real either. You think you deserve all this? You think any of this was made for you? The sky sea birds pigs peasant girls beer foam yeasty bread berries periwinkles mushrooms chicken hearts rivers and books were made for someone, maybe, but never, ever you. _

He hadn’t heard her tone, just the words. He smiled. She said nothing. She had already admitted the lie. “This castle was built for me,” he said. “Nothing was made with you in mind, servant girl. I proved your riddle wrong. Dance with me.”

Pig didn’t dance with him. She lay in bed reading. An extremely long book. She thoughtlessly placed the bookmark over her mouth and found that it stuck there. Her mouth was sweet-sticky, and tired of being alone. 

Not him, Pig said.

Not him, Goose said. Where was Goose? Ah, Goose says, when Sea asks her. It’s a secret.

You were hiding, Sea says. Watching her.

Yes, Goose says. But she knew I was there. She just didn’t know  _ where _ .

 

\---

 

“And what happened to the Prince?”

“Nothing happened to him,” Goose says. “We burnt the castle down. And then we left.”

 

\---

 

Or, maybe. “What did you do to the prince?”

We played with him / We preyed on him / We blamed him  / We paid him back.

“What did you do to him?”

There are stories that were once painful that are now so funny that they have been drained of anything else. That’s what Goose thinks. That’s what Goose thinks when she takes Sea’s hand. “I started to dream of good, sweet butter. I was up to my knees in mud. I didn’t want to ruin your mother’s game.”

They were still batting the ball back and forth. It was summer, and they were in love.

A question Sea never asks: Why this way around? It was the inversion which made it fun; anything else was just pain and reinforcement. Surely they understood this wordlessly, bodily.

The prince had asked Goose to dance, too. Pig was far away, in her chamber. No, wait. “I thought you were watching her,” Sea says, accusing. “You were up there with her. Just hiding.”

“Back down on earth,” Goose says. “I was with her in my dreams, and never else. He brought me a radio and a basket of pancakes that I didn’t know well enough to magic up myself. Sugar finer-grained than your skin.”

“And you danced with him.”

Because Pig had created the game, found the castle, taken Goose’s hand, it was hard to remember that she was so young then. As young as Sea is now. Younger. She had made the rules, and only allowed uncertainties about them to live inside her stomach and throat. They died as soon as she coughed. Inside her body was a closed world where nothing ruled but snakes. “She didn’t think I would betray her by telling the truth,” Goose says. “She knew how much I liked to lie. I’d started out as a princess, you know.”

“Go on,” Sea says. Goose sounds more like her old self, or so Sea figures. Beads rattle in her shoes as her legs shake with the memory of... dancing? Something else.

“But she thought maybe, after all of that, I wanted something she couldn’t give me.”

“The pancakes,” Sea says, hungry for batter and fat.

 

\---

 

They half-burn the pancakes. Pancakes taste good like that. 

If they had baked the batter, there would have been no pancakes and a tray of puffed-up puddings.

“He didn’t cook,” Goose says, unnecessarily. Sea flips a pancake over with a plastic spatula that melts if she leaves it resting on the pan for even a couple of seconds.

There were trials, to prove that Goose was the real deal. He couldn’t put a pea under her bed, because there was no bed. Only hay. Dance steps. Testing if she knew the radio. He wouldn’t often tell her that he was testing her, but oh. She knew. She knew.

“I was lonely,” Goose says. By which she means, I didn’t send him away...

No, that wasn’t it. “That’s not what I mean,” Goose says. He was no salve. “It was part of the game. I was loneliest in the hours I spent with him...”

Sometimes she saw Pig in the doorway. Always gone by the time Goose noticed. But Goose knew better than anyone that it didn’t mean that she hadn’t been there. That she wasn’t still there. So Goose fluffed up her hair, licked food from her knife and fork and never her spoon.

Pig was still eating with the prince every evening. What was she eating? Goose, and lamb, and trifle. The wine-red blood of rare meat, the curdled blood-red of wine on her fingers and mouth.

The rest of Pig’s hours became a haze of closing doors, doors that Goose could have sworn led to damp walls. A door in the middle of a corridor wall that was the width of Goose’s waist. Pig was the one watching, now. Only allowing herself to be watched at one precise moment; the moment of walking away.

“I knew the game was still on,” Goose says. She zests a lemon with a trick spin of her wrist that Sea knows she could never master. “Because she let me see her.”

 

\---

 

Sea does not know when Goose last saw Pig. Sea last  _ felt _ Pig on her 18th birthday. A cold powder kiss on one cheek, and a stack of books tied with black ribbon. A sailor’s knot. Pig was gone, of course, by the time Sea had opened her mouth to call out.

 

\---

 

For a while, the prince was the ball. A golden ball that sung out chimes when thrown, but clanged horribly when dropped. A princely ball; a ball that is of little use when the game is over.

The ball that gets lost at the start of a more interesting story.

 

\---

 

“Who won?” Sea asks. It’s Easter Vacation, and college have sent her home with nothing much but memories and a taste for breakfast.

“Not the Prince,” Goose laughs. But the ball never wins. It’s not allowed. It’s not in the rules. No matter how much power it has, it’s just an object. A little speck on the ground, a cold heart in the hand.

It may think it’s moving; but it only moves when the rules let it. The rules of the game; the rules of gravity. 

Goose laughs a lot when she thinks about those days. And if you asked the prince, he would have said -- she’s sure -- he would have said he won. Who got to keep the castle, after all? And if you asked gravity, it would say nothing, and all the little players would stay, mostly, with their feet firmly against the ground.

“It wasn’t that kind of game, in the end,” Goose says. “The prince trapped me inside the stove. He said until I started talking, I could not be set free. It was cold and hard and small inside, and I forgot about setting myself free. I was curled up inside it, inside my own body, and couldn’t make a sound. Maybe a whisper. But I didn’t want to talk to him; I didn’t want to break my promise. I just wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go home. You know, until then, I had barely thought of home. And now I thought of my poor, dead horse, who magic could not bring back. And of my mother, who was not anything like your mother. And then your mother was there, pulling off the top of the stove, flattening the horrible goose shed, wishing away all the dirt and straw with just a swipe of her hand as The Prince cowered in the corner. I have never seen anyone so furious in my life.”

Sea will sometimes find herself drawing a tennis court like a grid in spare pages in her notebook. It’s like she’s trying to understand the metaphor. “He really hurt me,” Goose says, wondering at it even now. “Nobody ever taught him to be gentle. Nobody ever taught him when to stop.”

Nobody ever taught Pig any of that either. Of course, Pig never had a mother, or an aunt, or a sister. She kissed Goose’s head. The differences between the rules of gravity and the rules of tennis go down to their bones. One is a skeleton, and one is the way it likes to dance.

Goose smiles to remember. She allows herself to remember that moment at greater and greater intervals. It is a sad kind of game, but it is hers. The way it had all fallen to the ground, balls dropped everywhere, as she swept Pig into her arms.

“Sea, there is so much badness in this world,” she says, as Sea struggles through a sheet on the grammar of a language nobody has spoken for hundreds of years (except maybe boys who still live in castles). “You have to remember this when you think about the actions of those you love.” Pig has been gone a very long time. And Goose is sad, still. But she refuses to be sad for  _ her _ . “If you find a boy with no magic, he might not be for you. Find one who understands it, even so. That magic knows no rules except those that you create.” And Sea is tired and blue, and she scrunches up her face, and she thinks about everybody she knows at college, and she says, “I have to write this essay now.”

Scribbling out another tennis court blueprint. The infinite ways a ball can hit the ground, at which point. All that matters is that everybody knows. Adding a new ending to an old word is the same thing. Kissing someone on a strange hidden part of their face. Somewhere else. 

A dizzying array of spells and songs to sing; the crack in the sky, a blue slough of rain.

She thinks of Teal, talking about magic and actuarial science. What’s the dividing line there? Sea’s not so sure, even as her pen dances in the air above her hands. But maybe Goose isn’t quite right. Magic is something new and wonderful; but at its heart it is one broken rule. Nothing holds the break open but faith. 

Perhaps there is no system here except what can be felt.

If that first castle -- Goose’s castle -- had never broken open, never burnt down, where would any of us be?

Sea kissed Teal at the last meal they shared before the break. Teal was in a ruby-red sweater and her hair was braided dark blue. Sea squashes her own nose, deep in thought. Her pen spins in the air. Outside, the tide rushes in. Later, it rushes out. Teal’s ex-boyfriend scratches on a pad of paper. Sea knows less and less of him. The grammar of this whole flushed world stretches out, piece by piece, like one long word.

**Author's Note:**

> hi, thanks for reading my weird little story. 
> 
> you can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/tambourine) and [tumblr](https://alwaysalreadyangry.tumblr.com) if u wish.


End file.
